The financial motivation to earn advertising revenue by spreading misinformation has been widely conjectured to be among the main reasons misinformation continues to be prevalent online. Research aimed at reducing the spread of misinformation has so far focused on user-level interventions with...

Entrepreneurs leading digital ventures are often advised to be adaptable. However, research on how to pursue adaptable strategies and whether such strategies improve short- or long-term digital venture outcomes is sparse. By utilizing the ability to control content presentation and to measure...

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries by conducting large-scale incentivized online...

The welfare contributions of the digital economy, characterized by the proliferation of new and free goods, are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the welfare contributions of these goods and introduce a new metric, GDP-B which quantifies their...

Research on the causal effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments and tracking effects over extended periods. We analyze a long-running field experiment of online advertising in which a random 0.5% subset of all users...

We run a field experiment to quantify the economic returns to data and informational externalities associated with algorithmic recommendation relative to human curation in the context of online news. Our results show that personalized recommendation can outperform human curation in terms of user...

Entrepreneurial motivation is important to the process of economic growth. However, evidence on the motivations of innovative entrepreneurs, and how those motivations differ across fundamental characteristics, remains scant. We conduct three interrelated field experiments with the MIT Inclusive...

Institutional change generates new opportunities, yet theory remains unclear on how durable, stable institutions, which are thought to constrain individuals, may also foster variation in individual behavior. We argue that institutions might enable variation in behavior by allowing, rather than...